It's a small language that looks familiar if you know other imperative Algol-derived languages. The point is not in that, the point is a single binary for everything, and portability.
It's like busybox, which is unremarkable as Unix userland, but is interesting because it's a single small binary.
But beyond the standard Algolish stuff, XS seems to have quite a few modern niceties, such as traits, generics, closures, OOP, pattern-matching, and even algebraic effects.
Assuming that's the primary value prop, they should go all the way and distribute it as a single cross-OS/arch fat binary. It looks like this may be a way to actually accomplish that: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan.
It's like busybox, which is unremarkable as Unix userland, but is interesting because it's a single small binary.
But beyond the standard Algolish stuff, XS seems to have quite a few modern niceties, such as traits, generics, closures, OOP, pattern-matching, and even algebraic effects.